With the prevalence of telephone technologies in recent years, there have been proposed wireless cellular phones and wired telephone machines which are provided with various functions. For example, there are practical implementations of functions to be used in the case where a receiver of a call cannot immediately answer the call. One such function allows a user, who is prevented from using his or her own voice to answer a call due to a circumstantial reason (e.g., the user being in a meeting or on a train), to answer the call with a pre-registered voice message, without causing any disturbance to others. Another such function, at a receiving-end terminal, allows an arbitrary method of calling or answering to be set with respect to each caller, such that the method of calling or answering as set is used when connecting to any preset caller.
However, according to conventional techniques such as the aforementioned functions, a message which was used in answering a received phone call was not stored in association with a telephone number of the calling-end terminal. Therefore, the user of the receiving-end terminal may forget which answering message has been sent to the calling-end terminal, and possibly make a blunder later on.
For example, consider a case where one calls back to someone because of having been unable to answer a received call, where an answering message saying “I am in a meeting” was sent. In this case, it would lead to the suspicion on the part of the other person if the person calling back says that he or she was not able to answer the last phone call because of “being on a train”, instead of the more-proper “being in a meeting”. Therefore, in such a case, before calling back, one needs to remember which answering message was previously sent. In particular, if the other person happens to call back first, one needs to instantaneously recall what was the answering message.
Therefore, an object of the present invention is to provide a mobile terminal and an incoming/outgoing call history management method which contribute to a smooth dialog by outputting an answering message which, at the time of an incoming or outgoing phone call or the like, was previously sent to a person on the other end of the phone call for facilitating confirmation.